What Does the Bible Say about Video Games? Part 1

There’s an old saying that’s popular among political candidates and publicity hounds: “All press is good press.”

Colleen Lachowicz is finding out whether or not this is true.

Who is Colleen Lachowicz?

Colleen Lachowicz is a Democratic candidate for state senator in Maine’s 25th district. The Republican Party of Maine recently “outed” her as an online gamer. Specifically, she has a high-level “orc assassination rogue” character in the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “World of Warcraft.” Her Republican opponents have made her online gaming into a campaign issue, putting out press releases and attack postcards about her “disturbing alter ego” and “bizarre double life.”

Unfazed, Colleen Lachowicz has replied, basically, “What’s the big deal about playing video games?” In fact, hundreds of millions of ordinary adults around the world play video games of various kinds. As far as Lachowicz is concerned, her Republican attackers are way behind the times; playing video games is just part of the new normal.

And now, a middle-aged woman named Colleen Lachowicz, who is running for state senate in Maine and who just happens to enjoy playing video games, may find out that for her, all press is good press. The Republican attack on her for her online gaming has drawn international press attention to her campaign, giving her far more name recognition and possibly more votes in her upcoming election than she otherwise would have had.

But never mind what the Maine Republican Party says about video games. What does the Bible say about video games?

First, let’s take care of one more myth:

Aren’t video games just one big addiction?

There is a big debate going on right now about whether “video game addiction” is really an addiction. It is clear that only a small percentage of people who play video games have a serious problem with excessive game-playing. For the vast majority of people who play video games regularly, their game play is something they do for fun in their spare time, averaging eight hours per week—which is just a little over an hour a day. Hardly an addiction.

Still, there are people who do spend way too much time gaming.

If you spend most of your waking hours playing video and online games, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your life sucks!

No, your life doesn’t suck because you play video games all day. You play video games all day because your life sucks.

Why does your life suck?

How should I know? Maybe you’re stuck in a brutal, dead-end marriage. Maybe you’re stuck in a job that you hate, working for a boss who drives you up the wall. Maybe you don’t fit in at school, and you’re a daily target of the snobs, cliques, and bullies. Maybe your overprotective—or unstable and negligent—parents are making your life miserable. I really don’t know why your life sucks.

But I’ve been there myself, and I know what it’s like. I’ve come out the other end, too. My hope and prayer for you is that you will soon be able to move out of this depressing phase of your life, and move on to a new and better phase. When life is good, video games lose their hold. You might still enjoy playing your favorite games in your spare time. But you’ll be much too busy with the rest of your life to spend all day at it.

So . . . what does the Bible say about video games???

Umm . . . is that a trick question? The Bible doesn’t say anything at all about video games! How could it? The Bible was written thousands of years ago. Video games have only been in existence for the last fifty years or so.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped various fundamentalist Christians from putting up web pages purporting to tell us what the Bible says about video games. They offer passages from the Bible condemning violence, sexual immorality, and various other wicked and impure things—presumably because these things are present in many popular video games.

These fundamentalist charges against video games and online gaming are echoed in other quarters, with additional charges for good measure: video games are unhealthful, they are linked to actual violence, they are antisocial, and so on, and so forth.

For every charge against video games, there are those who defend them against those charges. We don’t need to repeat all the arguments here. They’re easy enough to find with a few simple Internet searches.

What if the Bible were a video game?

Now I have a question for those who quote the Bible and condemn video games because they contain excessive and explicit violence, sexuality, immorality, and so on:

Have you read your Bible lately?

You can’t get four chapters in without encountering cold-blooded murder: fratricide, no less! (Genesis 4:1-16). And before that chapter has finished, yet another murder has taken place (Genesis 4:23-24). Two chapters later, supernatural beings are coming down to marry and have sex with beautiful young human females, who are bearing famous heroes and warriors as a result of these illicit liaisons with the gods (Genesis 6:1-4) In fact, God is so displeased with how wicked human beings have become that he decides to wipe everyone off the face of the earth except for the righteous Noah and his family (Genesis 6:4-8).

So after God kills everyone else on earth yet saves Noah in the famous ark, what’s the first thing Noah does when he and his family are finally able to leave the ark and live on dry land again? He plants a vineyard, gets drunk, and curses one of his three sons for the sin of walking in on him while he is lying around naked and inebriated in his tent (Genesis 9:18-27).

If that isn’t enough sex and violence for you, how about Bible stories of:

Genocide: In 1 Samuel 15:1-3, God commands his people, the Israelites, to utterly wipe out an entire nation, killing not only all of their men, but all of their women, children, and babies . . . and even their livestock.

Gang rape and murder: In Judges 19:20-28 local ruffians rape to death the wife of a traveler who is staying overnight at one of the houses in their town.

Dismemberment: At the end of the same story, in Judges 19:29-30, the woman’s husband cuts her dead body into twelve pieces and sends one piece to each of the tribes of Israel as a rallying cry to war against those who had raped and murdered his wife.

Attempted homosexual gang rape: In an earlier story in Genesis 19:1-11, all the men in the city of Sodom rush the house where two angel visitors are staying, intending to rape them. Incidentally, before the angels themselves put a stop to the whole horrid scene, their host offers the would-be rapists his own two virgin daughters in place of his angel guests.

Incest: In Genesis 38, Judah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob and the patriarch of the tribe of Judah, sleeps with his own daughter-in-law thinking she is a local prostitute, and fathers two of his three surviving sons through the union.

War, adultery, deceit, and murder: In 2 Samuel 11, while David, the famous warrior king of Israel, has his troops out killing and conquering their enemies, David sleeps with the wife of one of his soldiers and gets her pregnant. Unable to induce her husband to sleep with her in order to cover his tracks, David arranges for the soldier to be killed in battle, then takes the dead soldier’s wife for himself.

Certainly these are some of the most shocking stories in the Bible. But they are by no means unique. In fact, the Bible is chock full of sex and violence, including long, detailed descriptions of wars and battles, complete with all the strategy, murder, and mayhem.

Does the Bible really condemn sex and violence in video games?

Now, these are the sorts of arguments and Bible quotes found in articles written by atheists and skeptics to attack the Bible. And the skeptics do have a point. If the Bible contains so much violence, sexuality, and just plain objectionable material in it, how could it possibly be the Holy Word of God?

That’s a question for another time. For now I’ll simply say that I’ve read the entire Bible many times over, including its “worst” passages, and I firmly believe that it is the Good Book and the Word of God.

The point of all this is not that the Bible is an evil book. Rather, it is to point out that if video games are to be condemned because they contain violence and sex, then by that measure the Bible should be condemned as well.

As with the sex and violence in the Bible, I believe something more and deeper is going on in violent and suggestive video games.

Why are we drawn toward sex and violence in our entertainments?

In fact, if we think violent and sexualized video games should be banned, we might as well just go ahead and ban the whole world! This world of ours is filled with sex and violence.

Some of the sex and violence is good. If it weren’t for sex, we humans would have only one generation left, and then we’d cease to exist as a species. And if it weren’t for violence, what would all the football fans watch on Sunday afternoon?

Some of the sex and violence is bad. War, murder, rape, forced prostitution, sexual abuse, muggings, beatings, armed robberies . . . the list of how we hurt one another every day, on large and small scales, goes on and on.

In other words, for anyone living on this earth, sex and violence are simply a fact of life. We cannot ignore them. We must face them and deal with them.

Sex is a matter of reproduction. And the drive to reproduce ourselves is the most powerful, fundamental drive of every species, including humans.

Violence is a matter of life and death. And the survival instinct is second only to the reproductive instinct as a gut-level driving force in our lives.

We are drawn to these politically incorrect subjects of sex and violence because they deal with our deepest drives, our deepest fears, our deepest struggles, and our most powerful aspirations. The more we attempt to suppress these drives and sweep them under the rug in polite and acceptable discourse, the more we humans seek them out in other venues.

And quite frankly, video games are one of the least damaging ways we can engage in and deal with our powerful, conflicting human drives and emotions relating to issues of healthy and unhealthy sexuality, life and death, good and evil. No one is actually getting hurt in a video game. It’s all just pixels and lines of computer code. We are working out some of our deepest drives and desires in a relatively safe environment.

In short, we seek out sex and violence in video games, movies, books, and television shows because these are issues and drives that are close to our heart and in our gut.

This is also why there is so much sex and violence in the Bible.

The Bible is a book for adults. It deals with the entire range of human drives and passions, from the highest to the lowest. It does not shy away from any of the fundamental issues of human life. It puts all of them in the context of God’s relationship with human beings. It deals with every dark corner of our lives, as well as offering us the greatest spiritual light that we can comprehend and aspire to.

So . . . What does the Bible say about video games?

The Bible says nothing directly about video games. But if we read the entire Bible, both the “good” parts and the “bad” parts, and if we look at the entire Bible from a deeper perspective, we can arrive at a much more helpful and spiritual view of the video games that are played avidly in over two-thirds of American households.

In Part 2 of this article, I’ll take up this challenge, and shine a Biblical and spiritual light on the experience of adults, teens, and children as they engage in their favorite computer games.

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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.